Our family is small; I inherited ALL the photos and memorabilia from both sides. Choosing a single favorite image, as Amy Johnson Crow requests in her "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" challenge, is really hard. But for my first time through the challenge (Amy promises this is a frequently recurring theme, whew!), I have to pick the picture that spurred me to learn to use DNA in genealogy.
My father died when I was 8; my paternal grandfather, Erwin, died two years later and my grandmother, Helen, entered a memory care ward a couple of years after that. After she retired, my mother recorded lots of stories and information about her ancestors, but she didn't know much about Dad's side. She reached out to one of Helen's cousins but he said he hadn't known the couple well, either. "They kept to themselves, and didn't really seem to let anyone in to their little family circle," the cousin recalled.
After Mom died, I found what seemed to be my father's scrapbook and photo album in her things - I think she'd packed them away after he died and just forgotten about them, or perhaps not wanted to remember. As a nascent genealogist, I was thrilled to find pictures of my father as a boy and of Helen and her relatives. Oddly, however, there didn't seem to be anything for Erwin's side of the family. There were two studio portraits of him as a young man, and, tucked between them, one unidentified portrait of a young woman. She had a pensive and resolute expression that seemed somber even for the era; I fancied I could see my brother, my father and even myself in her face. She definitely didn't have The Nose from Helen's mother's side of the family, nor did she match the images of women from Helen's father's side. Was she possibly Erwin's mother?
Who was this serious, sad young woman? It somehow seemed very important that I find out.
I was able to use Mom's helpful family charts to begin to understand how to do genealogical research, filling out and then extending the details she had provided. Once I'd figured out how to use microfilm readers and census records – and the internet sprang up with marvelous online databases – Helen's family, also, wasn't difficult to trace.
And then things came to a screeching halt... Erwin wasn't anywhere he was supposed to be. His 1972 obituary gave an age of 68, so, born about 1904, he should be in the 1910 and 1920 U.S. census. He wasn't – not in my father's hometown of Monroe, Michigan, where I expected him, but also not in any other Feltz family or any other place that I could find, no matter how I changed the spelling (and, growing up as a "Feltz," I was more than expert at the many variations there could be). There was just no record of him until he married Helen -- in Monroe -- in 1923.
I was able to order his death certificate and then his birth certificate, which, surprisingly came with an entire probate case file. His birth certificate was Delayed, that is, it was not created until he was more than 30 years old, and that had required an extensive application, along with affidavits from two witnesses that said they'd known him a long time and he was who he said he was; sadly, both of them had also since passed away. I was also able to order his Social Security Number application (which was most likely the reason he had to have a birth certificate), and got not one but two applications, as though, perhaps, he had begun the application process, learned he needed a birth certificate and then initiated another application once he had that document. The papers I received contained a plethora of conflicting information. They all agreed that Erwin's father was Alfred Feltz, an actor (!) who was from Detroit, but one indicated his mother, Minnie Mohr, was from Bay City while another two said she was from Battle Creek. His birthdate was variously May 20 or May 21, 1904. The application for the delayed birth certificate provided the additional tidbit, in his own handwriting, that he grew up in Detroit, at "123 Congress Street."
Erwin's father, Alfred Feltz, turned out to be a moderately challenging research subject. Online marriage records provided the best trail, showing marriages to 3 different women in Detroit and one in Los Angeles before his death in California in 1914 at age 36. Unfortunately, none of the women was named Minnie, and the son he took to California with him, Arthur, was definitely not my grandfather. Arthur grew up in California, spending some time in San Quentin prison, whose records conveniently included a photo.
Erwin's 1923 marriage records also pointed to Minnie Mohr (or Moore) as his mother, but, like him, Minnie wasn't anywhere to be found. In the 1900 census there is a Wilhelmina Mohr, born in New York in 1877, "adopted daughter" to a well-to-do couple, Lena and Jacob Mohr, in Monroe. While neither Mohr obituary mentioned Minnie – and Jacob's 1912 obituary flatly states "there were no children," – I took a chance and ordered the probate file for Lena's 1935 will.
And there it was – widowed Lena Mohr left tens of thousands of dollars to a variety of Catholic charities but also $2000 to "Erwin Feltz who was raised by me."
So, Wilhelmina Mohr was Minnie, my great-grandmother. Considering Erwin's claim on his applications that his mother had been born in Battle Creek, I turned back to my mystery photo. I learned that the photographer, Frank Perry, had been in business in Battle Creek from 1884-1897. If the young woman was in her late teens or so that meant she was born sometime between 1865 and 1880 (or so) and her clothing and hair tended to put her at the latter end of that period. It seemed increasingly likely that the portrait was of Minnie, at least if she was born in 1877 as recorded in the census. But was Minnie from Battle Creek or was she born in New York? Where were she and my grandfather from 1904 until 1923? Why did Lena say she raised Erwin? How were my grandfather's origins so shrouded in mystery -- and I had never even had a clue?
At this point, I had exhausted the paper trail, but still didn't have much more than an adopted name and a possible month and date of birth. If I was going to find Minnie, I needed to find her birth family, and a few fruitless queries of the Michigan probate system for adoption records made me realize my only hope was to learn to use DNA. I'd taken a genealogical DNA test many years before and talked my brother into doing so, as well – I'd just never done anything with the data because, well, I didn't understand any of it. Now, retired and motivated, I started watching webinars and reading articles about how to make sense of the results. I made a Leeds chart and identified a big cluster of folks that didn't seem to fit in any of the "known" branches of my tree. I figured I was really onto something. As it turns out, I was, but it wasn't Minnie. That's a story for another day, but, now I had a new tool in the toolbox – DNA – and I made Minnie a new promise: that I would leave no chromosome unturned.
"Finding Minnie" has expanded my genealogy research skills by leaps and bounds and yet there's still so much I don't know -- both about research and about Minnie. I was able to fulfil my pledge to her, and will continue that story in future weeks.
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